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Iron Love
The year is 1913, the place a boys' school in colonial South Africa. For every boy, the heart of the school is his own House, his Housemaster and his particular Hero. And for every newboy coming through the hallowed doors, there are two commandments. The first, Silence and Denial. The Not to fail at Footer. Validation lies in honoring these. At whatever the cost.
- GenresFictionHistorical
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 8, 2018
What did I think? I think I loved this novel. I I loved the gentle and subtle way that it entwined you into its pages and the lives of the boys. I loved the memories of Grahamstown that it invoked and the way it gave me; as a white English South African a sense of belonging. It had no agenda, no political statement it was just a story about youth, love and acceptance. And Honour. You cannot forget honour.
It did of course make me cry bitterly into my pillow and my mothers lap. Not just because as the pages turned I grew attached to the boys and their individual and combined stories but also for the loss of an attitude and a sense of decency and honour (it always seems to come back to honour). I cried for the fictional characters and the not so fictional characters who did experience the atrocoties in West Africa and the Trenches. I cried for the loss of innocence and honour. But then at the same time I laughed when they laughed and celebrated when a try was scored.
One of the many things I loved about this novel was the fact that I could connect with the characters, their strengths and their weaknesses; even though I am a women and am living in the 21st Century. The characters were real, they were tangible and your opinions of them changed and developed and you just knew that Unwin wasn't as pathetic-or wouldn't stay as pathetic as he seemed. That he would come into his own. But I suppose that has something to do with the overwhelming power of the underdog.
Marguerite Poland is one of my favourite authors, she seems to sketch the most intricate and delicate images with becoming heavy handed or bombarding you with imagery and information. i think my favourite review of any novel has to be by Winston Churchill of the Hornblower series; he said that when C.S Forester writes a novel he doesn't merely write a novel; he presss gangs you into the British Navy (why am I bringing this up you may ask?) Well for me; Marguerite Poland has managed to engage me with the same intensity but has achieved it in a softer more subtle way but to the same enchanting and engaging effect.
This novel also gave a gentler view of South Africa, quite unlike the harsh opinion of J.M Coetzee and Zakes Mda. Perhaps it was the period about which she was writing-the turn of the century when things were simpler and I suppose times were a lot more innocent then they are now or have been. But I did not feel guilty about being a white South African as other South African novels have made me feel. I didn't feel guilty about being proud of my "Rhodesian" (my mother grew up a Rhodesian and my aunts we born there) roots. I didn't need to feel ashamed of the amount of tea I drank or the fact that I sometimes call it a loo and them trousers. The novel wasn't burdened with race.
I think if I only had three words to describe this novel they would be Honour, Redemption, Acceptence. Honour because they all for the most part seemed to behave honourable, take for example Annie Zeederberg and Charlie. He knew Arthur loved her and so he stepped back. But in doing so and working through his own feelings he alienated his closest friend. This is where Redemption comes in; he redeemed himself by taking the third cigarette, placing himself in fates path. And Acceptence; Archer, Unwin and even Cummings and Percy. Cummings had what Archer and Unwin craved and in the end eventually achieved.
Even though they didn't always feel like they did belong; they did... They would all become Old boys and they wouldl always have the shared history of being at the school. So in that sense they did belong. But I think now I will stop before I give the game away.
It did of course make me cry bitterly into my pillow and my mothers lap. Not just because as the pages turned I grew attached to the boys and their individual and combined stories but also for the loss of an attitude and a sense of decency and honour (it always seems to come back to honour). I cried for the fictional characters and the not so fictional characters who did experience the atrocoties in West Africa and the Trenches. I cried for the loss of innocence and honour. But then at the same time I laughed when they laughed and celebrated when a try was scored.
One of the many things I loved about this novel was the fact that I could connect with the characters, their strengths and their weaknesses; even though I am a women and am living in the 21st Century. The characters were real, they were tangible and your opinions of them changed and developed and you just knew that Unwin wasn't as pathetic-or wouldn't stay as pathetic as he seemed. That he would come into his own. But I suppose that has something to do with the overwhelming power of the underdog.
Marguerite Poland is one of my favourite authors, she seems to sketch the most intricate and delicate images with becoming heavy handed or bombarding you with imagery and information. i think my favourite review of any novel has to be by Winston Churchill of the Hornblower series; he said that when C.S Forester writes a novel he doesn't merely write a novel; he presss gangs you into the British Navy (why am I bringing this up you may ask?) Well for me; Marguerite Poland has managed to engage me with the same intensity but has achieved it in a softer more subtle way but to the same enchanting and engaging effect.
This novel also gave a gentler view of South Africa, quite unlike the harsh opinion of J.M Coetzee and Zakes Mda. Perhaps it was the period about which she was writing-the turn of the century when things were simpler and I suppose times were a lot more innocent then they are now or have been. But I did not feel guilty about being a white South African as other South African novels have made me feel. I didn't feel guilty about being proud of my "Rhodesian" (my mother grew up a Rhodesian and my aunts we born there) roots. I didn't need to feel ashamed of the amount of tea I drank or the fact that I sometimes call it a loo and them trousers. The novel wasn't burdened with race.
I think if I only had three words to describe this novel they would be Honour, Redemption, Acceptence. Honour because they all for the most part seemed to behave honourable, take for example Annie Zeederberg and Charlie. He knew Arthur loved her and so he stepped back. But in doing so and working through his own feelings he alienated his closest friend. This is where Redemption comes in; he redeemed himself by taking the third cigarette, placing himself in fates path. And Acceptence; Archer, Unwin and even Cummings and Percy. Cummings had what Archer and Unwin craved and in the end eventually achieved.
Even though they didn't always feel like they did belong; they did... They would all become Old boys and they wouldl always have the shared history of being at the school. So in that sense they did belong. But I think now I will stop before I give the game away.
November 28, 2024
'Charlie Fraser. For some, just a name, just a boy. For some, not even a remarkable boy. Call it devotion. It was as good a word as any. Why Charlie? Why not Dan or Mac or dear old Sparrow? Herbert only knew it to be so – for Charlie Fraser, despite his odd detachment, had presence. Presence. And whatever presence was, it ensured absolute devotion …The year is 1913, the place a boys’ school in colonial South Africa. For every boy, the heart of the school is his own House, his Housemaster and his particular Hero. And, for every new boy coming through the hallowed doors, there are two commandments. The first: Silence and Denial. The second: Not to fail at Footer. Validation lies in honouring these. At whatever cost.' From the back cover of the 1999 paperback edition from Viking books.
Before anything else let me make clear that although this is a novel set in a boys boarding school there is not even a hint or suggestion of anything that could in any way be seen as even the tiniest bit allusively homoerotic. These boys keep their pants on and their fly buttons buttoned. There is not just an absence of homo and hetero sex, in fact sex, the body, those young bodies playing footer and doing all sorts of physical things have no racing hormones. Sex is absent with a totality that is quite unbelievable. It is not that a boarding school story must be about sex. I recently reviewed a novel 'Vermin Blond' by Richard Davis set in a boys boarding school in the 1960s and sex has nothing to do with the story (I mention Vermin Blond because it is rather good and deserves more readers) but sex isn't absent from it. But it is from Iron Love in a way that makes it not simply a very old fashioned but a very odd novel.
I was not surprised to learn that Marguerite Poland had written a 496 page history of St Andrews School in Grahamstown, the school on which the school in this novel is based, before writing this novel and she acknowledges that this novel is:
"...closely based on truth...The story has been constructed from fragments of boy-history, family legend, a passing anecdote from an old boy, the experience of a present pupil..."
She also says:
"The fifteen boys who gazed at me from the 1913 First XV photograph in the school archives have been the source from which much of the story sprang. Those fine, valorous young men embody the spirit of the time. Within five years, seven of the fifteen had lost their lives in battle...I feel the tribute paid to one by a Commanding Officer, so long ago, could stand for all, 'If ever I have a son, I shall be proud to know he was like your boy-lovable, courteous and altogether delightful.'"
So this novel is a labour of love, it is not a novel of 1999 but a novel, in inspiration and intent, of 1920. This is the novel that the mothers of the dead of WWI wanted to be written about their boys. Instead they got 'Goodbye to all That' by Robert Graves, 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, 'All Quiet on the Western Front' by Eric Maria Remarque and 'Storm of Steel' by Ernst Junger.
It is also worth remembering that by the time this novel was published in 1999 the 'Regeneration' the regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker had been published and I could go on quoting novels about WWI which this novel seems to ignore. It isn't that the novel doesn't passionately hate war it seems not to want to think about war. Those 'lovable, courteous and altogether delightful' young soldiers who had just ceased being school boys are not real, they are ciphers, plaster saints, bloodless, insubstantial. No real mother loved or mourned those boys. I can't help feeling there is a terrible falseness in this story of a doomed generation on the eve of war. It is the tidied-up tale for 20th century readers who don't want reality. They don't want all that nasty reality. They want beautiful falsity and this novel is false, not because there is not sex but because we are reading about cliches.
When I first came to London in the 1970s I remember visiting the flats of elderly upper middle class widow ladies in their 70s or more, and invariably there would be amongst other mementos of their lives, various studio portraits of of handsome young men who had not come back from WWI. They were ghosts still haunting people who were only children when they died. Maugerite Poland's version of such lives is like those studio photographs, air-brushed and sanitised so they are just undifferentiated cliches of a lost generation. They supply a poignant touch amongst the clutter.
Ms. Poland writes well but I wanted her boys to throw over the traces and get drunk and fornicate and upset the nice people. If not their spunk I wanted their blood and passion to be real. I wanted them to live because I wanted them to spit at the decorous nullity that sent off to die.
But it isn't that sort of novel. It isn't my sort of novel. Maybe it is yours, I hope not.
Before anything else let me make clear that although this is a novel set in a boys boarding school there is not even a hint or suggestion of anything that could in any way be seen as even the tiniest bit allusively homoerotic. These boys keep their pants on and their fly buttons buttoned. There is not just an absence of homo and hetero sex, in fact sex, the body, those young bodies playing footer and doing all sorts of physical things have no racing hormones. Sex is absent with a totality that is quite unbelievable. It is not that a boarding school story must be about sex. I recently reviewed a novel 'Vermin Blond' by Richard Davis set in a boys boarding school in the 1960s and sex has nothing to do with the story (I mention Vermin Blond because it is rather good and deserves more readers) but sex isn't absent from it. But it is from Iron Love in a way that makes it not simply a very old fashioned but a very odd novel.
I was not surprised to learn that Marguerite Poland had written a 496 page history of St Andrews School in Grahamstown, the school on which the school in this novel is based, before writing this novel and she acknowledges that this novel is:
"...closely based on truth...The story has been constructed from fragments of boy-history, family legend, a passing anecdote from an old boy, the experience of a present pupil..."
She also says:
"The fifteen boys who gazed at me from the 1913 First XV photograph in the school archives have been the source from which much of the story sprang. Those fine, valorous young men embody the spirit of the time. Within five years, seven of the fifteen had lost their lives in battle...I feel the tribute paid to one by a Commanding Officer, so long ago, could stand for all, 'If ever I have a son, I shall be proud to know he was like your boy-lovable, courteous and altogether delightful.'"
So this novel is a labour of love, it is not a novel of 1999 but a novel, in inspiration and intent, of 1920. This is the novel that the mothers of the dead of WWI wanted to be written about their boys. Instead they got 'Goodbye to all That' by Robert Graves, 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, 'All Quiet on the Western Front' by Eric Maria Remarque and 'Storm of Steel' by Ernst Junger.
It is also worth remembering that by the time this novel was published in 1999 the 'Regeneration' the regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker had been published and I could go on quoting novels about WWI which this novel seems to ignore. It isn't that the novel doesn't passionately hate war it seems not to want to think about war. Those 'lovable, courteous and altogether delightful' young soldiers who had just ceased being school boys are not real, they are ciphers, plaster saints, bloodless, insubstantial. No real mother loved or mourned those boys. I can't help feeling there is a terrible falseness in this story of a doomed generation on the eve of war. It is the tidied-up tale for 20th century readers who don't want reality. They don't want all that nasty reality. They want beautiful falsity and this novel is false, not because there is not sex but because we are reading about cliches.
When I first came to London in the 1970s I remember visiting the flats of elderly upper middle class widow ladies in their 70s or more, and invariably there would be amongst other mementos of their lives, various studio portraits of of handsome young men who had not come back from WWI. They were ghosts still haunting people who were only children when they died. Maugerite Poland's version of such lives is like those studio photographs, air-brushed and sanitised so they are just undifferentiated cliches of a lost generation. They supply a poignant touch amongst the clutter.
Ms. Poland writes well but I wanted her boys to throw over the traces and get drunk and fornicate and upset the nice people. If not their spunk I wanted their blood and passion to be real. I wanted them to live because I wanted them to spit at the decorous nullity that sent off to die.
But it isn't that sort of novel. It isn't my sort of novel. Maybe it is yours, I hope not.
August 26, 2017
A beautifully written, heartbreaking book. Why do we allow the politicians to convince us that we should go to war? Not easy to read, but well worth the effort.
August 30, 2018
Loved this! Charlie Fraser haunted me for days after I finished Iron Love. It's almost always a searing experience reading Marguerite Poland's novels. I loved this one's connection with old Grahamstown and some familiar landmarks (MP and I were in the same English class at Rhodes). Her exquisite descriptions of setting, fully rounded, complex characters and skill in plumbing into the reader's emotional depths never fail. This is one of my very favourites; the afterglow continues. But the old colonial system of preparing schoolboys for life and war and placing honour, discipline and grit above kindness - and the appalling loss of these young men in WWI lingers even now.
February 26, 2018
I read this book for the first time many years ago, and I still find myself coming back to it over and over again. A beautifully written novel with a heartbreaking message.
August 3, 2011
i have read this book 4 times and cannot wait to read it again. Need I say more
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews